Position statement:

The role and the mission of Universities and specifically of Technical Universities have considerably changed over the last ten years, due to the rapid development of Technology and to the crisis of the traditional social-economic models.

Universities, that originally were mainly focused on higher education and on the creation, promotion and development of new knowledge, are now asked to give a substantial contribution for addressing, through a rigorous approach, big societal challenges: energy, food, population, climate changes, health care, in one word a sustainable future for people living on our planet.

Within this framework, Information Technologies will have a crucial and significant impact on the strategic policies that Universities should develop in the medium term:

• research and technology transfer policies should promote a collaborative and  interdisciplinary approach and the creation of inter-department laboratories/Centers, possibly in partnership with industry, where IT technology and methodologies are developed in multidisciplinary fields, like energy, transports, health care and others;
• education in IT should provide a Bachelor/First level degree with a fundamental  background in mathematics, physics and chemistry and some Masters of Science/Second level degrees, focused on IT application to interdisciplinary subjects, possibly co-designed by Academy and Industry; in particular the potentiality of MOOCs for regular and continuing education should be exploited;
• both for research and teaching an entrepreneurial approach should be developed, by promoting incubators, with a section devoted on interdisciplinary IT businesses, and proper policies for exploiting the most significant outcomes in IT research and applications.  

About the panel member:

Marco Gilli is Professor of Electrical Engineering at the First Faculty of Engineering of the Politecnico di Torino (Technical University of Torino). From May 2002 to September 2003 he was Deputy Dean of the First Faculty of Engineering of the Politecnico di Torino and from October 2003 to September 2005 he was Vice Dean of the same Faculty (responsible for the Graduate School). From October 2005 to February 2012 he served as Deputy Rector (responsible for Academic Affairs) and since March 2012 he has been appointed Rector of the Politecnico di Torino.

Marco Gilli has been Scholar Visitor at the University of California - Berkeley (Nonlinear Electronics Laboratories - Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) in 2002 and 2003 and at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

His research activity is mainly in the area of nonlinear circuits and systems, cellular neural/nonlinear networks, nonlinear network theory and applications and partially in the field of electromagnetic theory. He is co-author of two papers that received the Best Paper Award in 1994 and 2004 from the International Journal of Circuit Theory and Applications. He is also author or co- author of more than 70 peer reviewed international journal papers and more than 100 international conference contributions.

In 1998 Marco Gilli won the Ravani prize, awarded by the Academy of Science of Turin, for contributions to Physics and in particular to Electrical Engineering (in occasion of the centenary of the death of the Italian scientist Galileo Ferraris).

Since January 2005, Marco Gilli has been a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). From 1999 to 2003 Marco Gilli was Associate Editor of the IEEE, Transactions on Circuits and Systems. Since January 2006 he has been appointed Editor in Chief of the International Journal of Circuit Theory and Applications. Since 2010 he has been a member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Bifurcations and Chaos. In the period 2002-2003 he was appointed Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Circuits and Systems (CAS) Society. He has been elected member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Circuits and Systems (CAS) Society, for the period 2006-2008. Marco Gilli is a member of the IEEE-CAS Technical Committee on Cellular neural networks and array computing (Chair from 2007 to 2009) and of the IEEE-CAS Technical Committee on Nonlinear circuits and systems. He is currently the Chair of the CAS Chapter of the IEEE North Italy Section. From 2005 to 2009 Marco Gilli was the President of the Italian Society of Chaos and Complexity. From 2007 to 2010 he also was the President of the Microsoft Innovation Center (a research and innovation center, located in Torino, and participated by Microsoft and the Politecnico di Torino). He is also a member of the Board of Governors of the Human Genetic Foundation (a research center, participated by the University of Torino, the Politecnico di Torino and the "Compagnia di San Paolo," a Bank Foundation) and of ST-Polito (a consortium partecipated by ST-Microelectronics and Politecnico di Torino).